The initiative was developed after realizing the massive need to extend formal funding facilities to the growing number of women entrepreneurs in the country, by providing them systematic training and know-how to develop their business model, fine tune ideas, enhance pitching capabilities and create better value for the segment.

The 12 week women entrepreneur exclusive incubation programme was started after interviewing more than 4806 women entrepreneurs across the country, which helped VCats and Wopreneur to zero in on the target areas and boost the collective woman entrepreneurial ecosystem as a whole.

Women entrepreneurs have traditionally found it difficult to
acquire sufficient capital to support their business ventures due to various
socio-economic reasons. For instance, women generally do not have the rights to
familial property, which stops them from using it as mortgage or collateral to
raise business funds. As a result, they have to either opt for informal lending
sources with higher interest rate or turn to friends and acquaintances, which
are ineffective when large amount of corpus is involved. The initiative was
developed to help women entrepreneurs overcome this bottleneck, and provide
them comprehensive training during the entire pre and post pitching stage that
helps them pitch their ideas effectively to institutional investors.

Commenting on the programme, Dr. ApoorvRanjan Sharma,
Founder, Venture Catalysts said, “Through our extensive networking
events and efforts to reach out to the start-up community, we realized that the
numbers of women entrepreneurs across the country were steadily growing.
However, these highly talented business women were under-confident of their
abilities to raise funds and pitch their ideas to potential investors, due to a
lack of exposure to such scenarios.

We joined hands with Wopreneur, a dedicated women
entrepreneurial ecosystem facilitator platform to fill this gap by undertaking
a detailed, mentoring focused incubation programme that empowers women
entrepreneurs. Furthermore, the programme is set to conclude with a pitching
event wherein the best business ideas and entrepreneurs will be pitching their
concepts to the large networking community of VCats. We believe that the programme
will be a huge step forward in facilitating the growth of women
entrepreneurship in the country and transform them into strong, self-reliant
and experienced entrepreneurial figures ready to engage with institutional
investors and strike deals that optimize the growth and value prospects of
their business along with enriching the women entrepreneur community with lots
of opportunities and prospects.”

Wopreneur, with a 10,000+ strong community of women
entrepreneurs and professionals, has been at the forefront of empowering women
business leaders compete shoulder-to-shoulder with the best in the business.
“It is disappointing to see great business ideas developed by women
entrepreneurs be stuck in anonymity due to a paucity of funds or lack of
investment opportunities.” Founder, Neha Chatterjee, Wopreneur said. “VCats, being one of the biggest investment incubators in Asia, has
strongly backed this movement that will certainly have larger socio-economic
ramifications, rather than the immediate huge objective of enabling women
entrepreneurs seek the necessary funds to launch their projects through
independent negotiations with famous investors. Through our 10 month long
research, we realized how crucial a role formal investment can play in bringing
these ideas to the forefront of the start-up ecosphere and why training is
necessary for the entrepreneurs to defeat this status quo. We hope the
participants will be able to generate a lot of funds post the programme through
pitching events, and break many glass ceilings in the process.”

Application process to attend the programme will begin from
March 8 onwards and interested candidates can connect via the social media
pages of VCats as well as Wopreneur.The initiative seems to serve as the
perfect training ground for women entrepreneurs looking to hone their pitching,
networking and fund-raising skills, while the subsequent pitching event will
serve as the ideal launch pad for high potential business ideas to secure the
funds required to convert their business vision into a reality.

About Venture Catalysts (@vcatsIndia)

Venture Catalysts is India’s first
integrated incubator. It invests $250K – $1.5 Million in early stage
startups that has potential to create enduring value for over a long period of
time.

Venture Catalysts brings lethal
combination of Capital, Mentoring and Business Network to help investee
companies to succeed. Our innovation provides value to startups through its
angel network, funding, community, services and co-working facility.

About Wopreneurs

Wopreneur believes that
financial empowerment of women is most important, hence team Wopreneur is
creating an ecosystem for Women Entrepreneurs to help them realise their
potential. Wopreneur believes that if women step up and use their resilience,
grit and focus they can achieve anything.